A non-programmer friend forwarded me a CSS file that was causing him some grief. After looking at the css and the target html, I suggested his first problem was forgetting the “Cascading” in “Cascading Style Sheets.” I suggested telling his coder to start with a style reset from either Tripoli or Yahoo, and then clean up the invalid HTML.
A few hours later came the question “how do I do that in SiteGrinder.” Whowaswhatzit? “Yeah, well, I dropped my web guy. We create all our web pages in PhotoShop.”
I popped over to the SiteGrinder site, and immediately saw that in their world, there was no need to worry about setting proper fonts. Here is what I saw using FireFox 3 on Linux:
SiteGrinder Oops
*SiteGrinder 2 turns Adobe Photoshop into an easy-to-use and powerful website design and production tool. It’s true! In fact, a SiteGrinder 2-equipped designer with no HTML expertise needs only their Photoshop skills to go from design concept to full deployment of a professional, standards-compliant website in just minutes with no programming whatsoever … and they do it all from within Photoshop. SiteGrinder 2 takes care of everything, even ensuring cross-platform browser compatibility. Best of all, pages created with SiteGrinder 2 retain the exact look and layout of the parent Photoshop file from which they were created.
Amazing!
Well, at least there aren’t any multi-nested tables with rowspans and colspans and overstretched clear gifs. But its not quite baked yet. And as customers and users expect more dynamic interaction, intuitive responses, and solid SEO – the farther tools like SiteGrinder will fall behind.
One-man bands can impress, and even entertain on occasion. But they rarely make wonderful music. SiteGrinder is an impressive novelty act. Don’t bet your biz on it.
- Blogcritic: Software Review – Adobe Photoshop
- Photoshop Support: SiteGrinder 2 — Photoshop Plugin Review
- And of course, Softpedia
I disagree. The more complex website creation becomes and the more demands are put upon websites, then the more useful tools like these become.
SiteGrinder, Joomla, MODx, WordPress, Blogger, ZenCart, Magenta, RapidWeaver, MySpace, Facebook, Google Pages, the list goes on and on and on. At first, you may think these are all very different from one another, that they should not be compared, but all provide a large value by doing a lot for a user with no html experience. Some do SEO well, some do not. Some follow web standards, others do not. Some give users freedom of design, others are template driven. Most have trade-offs of one sort or another: functionality at the expense of standards, SEO at the expense of design, etc. None are perfect.
But, what is becoming increasingly clear to me as a coder, is that while I may be able to do better, by hand, anything done by those tools above, I cannot do it at the same cost or as expeditiously. Increasingly, I find it smarter to incorporate tools like those into my own offerings and workflow to stay competitive. I often bring value by improving upon or customizing the output of these tools, rather than foregoing them.
As to SiteGrinder, I can’t say, that’s not the type of sites I do. I’ve heard good things about it, but I’m sure it isn’t perfect. The main question should be: is it productive?
R.
no offense but how many actually use linux except for servers?? im not sure maybe a lot but i dont know one person that does. So all that really matters is your general audience which is either windows or mac i know for fact it works in both.
“M” has a good point – but missed mine. It’s not about Linux. Its about creating valid, well-formed and functional XHTML and CSS. Lots of web sites “looked fine” until Firefox, or the iPhone/Safari, or IE7 came out. Lots of sites “look fine” but are absolute spaghetti to search engines and web tools.
And in fact several people emailed me links to their sites done in SiteGrinder that break in Safari . . .
Good points
I have no coding experience what so ever, and I don’t plan to use SG for creating websites for profit. I want to build for personal use like a portfolio or online store. Do you think it is worth the cost for someone in my position?
Absolutely NOT! Use WordPress and find a good, inexpensive premium template. Using SG gives you the HTML, not an interactive web site.
Thanks Phil for the heads up, it would have sucked to waste the cash and find that out.
I am a graphic designer, with very little web experience. I have been trying to jump into the web stuff using dreamweaver, with no luck. I am trying to cross a very difficult barrier and I am looking at the option of purchasing sitegrinder, just to make life a little easier. All i really want to know is what is the ‘big’ difference between sitegrinder and dreamweaver? when purchased, it is only a $50 difference… why such a high price tag, if it isnt up there at the ‘adobe level’?
Because there is a huge difference between creating a web site, or even a web page, and creating a layout. If you want to learn about web dev, start out learning the fundamentals – for example, try “Build Your Own Website the Right Way Using HTML & CSS.”
You need to be able to build a web page semantically and then apply css to implement the design.
I have built a bunch of sites with Sitegrinder, and was very disappointed when I discovered the flaws when viewing said pages with a Linux machine, or mobile browsers such as the stock browsers found on the Android platform. Upon contacting Sitegrinder, they told me to use the -grow hint to resolve the issue. Unfortunately the -grow hint does not fix the issue, because it can only grow text boxes, not images. The issue is usually text over running a background image, such as a box around the outside of the text.